In recent years e-mail has transformed into an indispensable business tool. Email once used as a mode of personal communication has extended its reach to a plurality of diversified segments including business administration, human resources management and marketing management, to name a few. Existing email functions also provide some sort of proof of delivery of the mail to the intended recipient. For example, in certain email systems senders are provided with the option of obtaining notifications about the status of their messages. i.e., when a message is delivered to the intended recipient, the sender gets a notification stating that the message has been delivered to the intended recipient. Alternatively, if the sender requests for delivery notification, the email system might provide a delivery notification to the sender. Even though the aforementioned feature (delivery reports corresponding to emails) is not mandatory, some of the email systems provide this facility. Since accountability for transmitted email is non-existent or minimal, senders are wary of the fact that their confidential emails may be delivered to non-intended recipients, and recipients are wary of the fact that they might receive emails from unidentified/unknown sources.
Therefore there is a need for an email system/method that can scrutinize the identity of at least the sender before sending the email generated by the sender.
To resolve the accountability issue, some email service providers came up with the concept of third party notifications wherein a third party would act as an intermediary between the sender and receiver. The third party would monitor the status of emails transmitted from a sender and intended for a recipient/receiver. The third party was supposed to accordingly update on the status of email to the sender. However, one of the primary disadvantages of the third party notification concept is that the email and the corresponding attachments were to be loaded on to the third party website. Such a necessity resulted in a communication method that was slow and cumbersome. Moreover, the third party systems did not have any mechanism to authenticate the sender of the message and verify that the sender is the owner of the email being transmitted. Therefore, there was felt a need for a system/method that overcame the aforementioned disadvantages. The present invention satisfies these, and other needs.